Wichita State Will Join The American Conference For 2017-18. This Is Fine.

Wichita TV station KAKE and Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports are both reporting that the Wichita State Shockers will join the American Athletic Conference in all sports but football for the 2017-18 season.

If this is the case, despite the fervent objections of our friends @NoEscalators, the Shockers will give some balance to the league. 12 teams and works a lot better for divisions and travel than 11, and the AAC adds a team with a lot of acquired NCAA tournament units and a stable base of fans. And since Navy is already in the AAC West for football, keeping the same divisions for football as well as basketball makes a lot of sense.

According to Kansas.com, the Shockers will forefit all previously earned NCAA Tournament units to the Missouri Valley Conference they’re leaving, but otherwise there’s no exit fee. Having Wichita for everything else balances out having Navy for just football. This seems like a win-win here, especially if the Shockers are willing to punt a few years of revenue sharing for the upgrade in competition.

Although this isn’t a total solution for all sports as not everyone in the league offers every sport such as baseball, softball, swimming, rowing, etc... it does help for men’s and women’s basketball tremendously.

A quick poll of our blog writers shows none of us have ever been to Wichita, home of USF men’s basketball alumni JAWANZAA Poland, and not much else of which we’re aware. But they sell a lot of tickets, the arena looks really weird but cool, and it’s also named after a metric fuckton of evil (#STICKTOSPORTS nope not when they put their name on arenas USF will play in).

So what say you? Happy about the Bulls adding Kansas to the travel route?